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The Test: Are We the Tougher?

IT may be a useful moment to take stock of the basic principles that have guided national security policy over the recent years. In 1961‐62, our central task on the world scene was to turn back Khrushchev's post‐Sput­nik offensive—if possible, without ma­jor military engagement. Those years were a time of acute crisis at many points on the world scene, but notably centered on Berlin and Cuba. Since the October, 1962, Cuba missile crisis, there has been relative quiet in United States‐Soviet relations and on the cen­tral front in Europe. But situations could evidently arise, in Southeast Asia or elsewhere, which would plunge us back into major crisis—as, indeed, the meeting last week of U. S. diplomatic and military leaders in Honolulu suggests.

At the heart of national security policy is the relation between military and nonmilitary objectives, between force and politics. We start with two propositions:

First, there is hardly a diplomatic re­lationship we conduct that is not col­ored by an assessment of United States military power and by the circum­stances in which we are likely to bring it into play. Our military capabilities and our will to use them in the pursuit of vital national interests and purposes are the inescapable backdrop for the whole of our civil policy.

Second, our objectives are, in the largest sense, political, not military. We regard ourselves as engaged in a funda­mental, historical contest as to how the community of nations shall be organ­ized; whether it shall be on the basis of a Communist empire and Communist police‐state dictatorships, or on the basis of independent nations which act together—out of a spontaneous recog­nition of their areas of interdependence —and move progressively toward higher degrees of human freedom.

AS the Secretary of State has said, our goal is victory. He went on to ex­plain: “One hears now and then that we have a ‘no win’ purpose or policies. That is simply not so. Of course we in­tend to win. And we are going to win. Our objective is a victory for all man­kind.

“For let us be clear about what we mean when we say, ‘We are going to win.’ Who makes up the ‘we’? Not only 185 million Americans, but most of the rest of the people of the world. And what is the worldwide victory we work for? Not the victory of one na­tion over another or of one people over another, but a worldwide victory for freedom. ...”

A military policy which is an ef­fective servant of this grand objective must begin with an appreciation of three fundamental facts.

First, the Soviet Union now com­mands sufficient nuclear power and de‐

W. W. ROSTOW, economist and historian, is chairman of the State Department's Policy Planning Council and author of the forth­coming book “View From the 7th Floor.”

Second, it has been, thus far, So­viet policy to avoid general nuclear war with the United States, which would result in massive damage to so­cieties under Communist control, and, indeed, gravely risk the continuity of that control. In fact, from 1945 to the present, Communist policy has system­atically avoided confrontation with United States points of real strength.

THIRD, Communist thrusts into the free world have been based on a com­bination of political pressure designed

Looking back to 1945, one can quite easily reconstruct the thinking of Communist planners. They systemati­cally chose their directions of thrust after a careful analysis of gaps in the free world spectrum of defense. Re­gionally, for example, they probed northern Azerbaijan, Greece, Berlin, Indochina and South Korea. In general, they have been acutely aware of the vulnerability of the free world to tech­niques of subversion and guerrilla war­fare which, until recently, appeared to lie beneath the threshold of our ef­fective defensive capabilities.

Faced with this kind of enemy, a ra­tional military policy must include these elements:

First, the maintenance of a sophisti­cated mix of delivery vehicles for nu‐

Second, we require a full spectrum of general purpose forces and‐counter­guerrilla forces sufficient to make non­nuclear aggression into the free world increasingly unpromising to the Com­munists, and permit us to frustrate such aggression without being forced by non‐nu‐

In broadest terms, the mili­tary objective is to create from these instruments an en­vironment which will permit us to achieve maximum deter­rence of deliberate aggression, and especially aggression with nuclear weapons; to minimize the likelihood of uncalculated, unpremeditated or unintended nuclear conflicts, and to deal successfully with aggression in such ways that the intensity of conflict is controlled, enemy escalation is deterred and gen­eral war does not result from the uncontrolled pressures of crises and limited conflicts.

WE seek, in short, a mili­tary environment of maximum stability consistent with our national interests and pur­poses.

These conventional and la­borioug phrases are by no means abstract, bureaucratic boilerplate. They are working guides for our Government as we face specific day ‐ to ‐ day tasks of leading the free world in the cold war.

Think for a moment of how the Cuban crisis of October, 1962, was conducted. The So­viet Union sought to shift the political and military balance of power on the world scene at a stroke. If we had accepted the missiles in Cuba—beneath our early warning network—our nuclear capability would have been substantially de­graded; the credibility in Mos­cow and in Europe of our com­mitment to West Berlin would have been put in grave ques­tion; the image of Soviet pow­er would have been projected starkly into Latin America, and the expectation of further extension of Soviet power in Latin America, and other un­derdeveloped areas, would have radically increased.

FROM the Soviet point of view, this was a limited thrust whose success depended on these three elements: first, the shadow over the West of So­viet nuclear power; second, the likelihood of a political split within the West as to whether the issue in Cuba was worth the risk of nuclear war; and third, the likelihood that the United States, in the face of these dangers and schisms, would not be prepared to initi­ate — I repeat, to initiate —military action.

President Kennedy's response —worked out under the pres­sure of a unique crisis—closely followed the general lines of basic policy which had evolved within his Administration. He defined a clear and limited political objective: the removal from Cuba of offensive weap­ons. He rallied to this policy our allies in Latin America, a prior basis having been created by careful diplomacy over many months. The Atlantic community as well rallied around, partly as a result of

THE late President chose a form of initiative which was limited but directly relevant to the political objective; a dis­criminating quarantine. Behind this limited move, we com­manded, in an advanced state of alert, a very wide range of general purpose and nuclear forces capable of dealing with any level of escalation that Moscow might select in re­sponse to our initiative.

Essential to this exercise was a simple fact: there was not an ounce of bluff in the American position. As a Gov­ernment and as a nation, we were deadly serious about a deadly serious matter.

The limited initial action cho­sen by the Administration gave the Soviet authorities an op­portunity to realize that they had miscalculated and to re­verse their course. But, if our limited initial action had not been. effectively persuasive, we would have taken further steps. We were determined to eliminate Soviet offensive weapons from this hemisphere and prepared to do whatever was necessary to achieve that end.

In a preliminary assessment of the lessons of the Cuban crisis, the inextricable connec­tion between military force and diplomacy is plain. On the one hand, the whole exercise hinged on the existence of a full range of appropriate United States military capa­bilities and the evident will to use them if necessary. On the other hand, our use of force, or threat to use it, was related to a limited, legal and lucidly defined objective: the inacceptability in this hemi­sphere of Soviet offensive weapons. In this crisis, there was no diplomatic move which did not have a military compo­nent, and there was no mili­tary move which was not related intimately to our dip­lomatic and political require­ments and purposes.

JUST as Moscow's adventure with offensive weapons in Cuba, if successful, would have had worldwide military and nonmilitary consequences—af­fecting the whole balance of the cold war — so its with­drawal of those weapons has had substantial costs to the in­ternational Communist move­ment, the full measure of which is still unfolding more than a year after the event.

The Cuban crisis was the most intense and dangerous of the politico‐military crises of the past two years, but it was only one of several. In Laos, for example, we set a political objective; the crea­tion of a neutral, independent Laos. But movement toward

IN Vietnam, we are com­mitted to maintain the politi­cal independence of South Vietnam in the face of the guerrilla war mounted, in its present phase, from Hanoi since 1959. To achieve this political result has required that we radically increase the American military presence there, and the President and the Secretaries of State and Defense have made it plain we have not ruled out the appli­cation of still greater force if that should become necessary to achieve our objective.

The military initiatives with respect to Laos and Vietnam, in pursuit of clearly defined and limited political objectives, would have had no serious ef­fect on the course of events unless the Communist leaders concerned were convinced that, echeloned behind these limited demonstrations of force, there had been both the capabilities and the will to deal with every form of escalation they might mount in response, up to and including all‐out nuclear war.

In the Congo, we experi­enced in 1961‐62 an even more complex politico‐military exer­cise. Our objective was to help create an independent and uni­fied nation in the Congo. That objective was endangered by the evident Communist ambi­tion to establish a base in Central Africa which would have provided exceedingly at­tractive possibilities for sub­version and guerrilla warfare throughout the region.

In this case, the military force actually involved was mounted by the United Na­tions, without calling on the troops of any of the major powers. Every inch of the way has been difficult. But the danger of the installation of a Communist‐controlled Govern­ment has been thus far fore­stalled by a combination of awkward, interminable, frus­trating—but quite effective—military and political moves.

THE greatest and most dif­ficult of the exercises in politico ‐ military operations thus far undertaken has been in Berlin, where the immediate tactical situation is by no means as favorable to us as it is in the Caribbean, or even in Southeast Asia, and where the possibilities of the controlled use of force and diplomacy appear, at first glance, to be narrower.

The interweaving of military and nonmilitary action in these five crises has not been con­fined to what might be called the framework of confronta­tion with the Communist powers. The linkage has been even more intimate. In the case of Cuba, we have been concerned with the state of mind of the peoples of Latin America,as well as of their leaders; with the psychological

In Vietnam and Laos, the nature of the defense problem has required an extraordinary intimacy and common under­standing—both in the field and in Washington—of the inter­connections between political, economic and military policy. That interconnection is of the essence of guerrilla warfare. It was a judgment by the Vietna­mese military that the politics of Diem's regime were incom­patible with victory against the Communists which, essen­tially, caused the coup last November.

In Berlin, our military and civil authorities have been concerned not merely with the defense of our vital interests, but also with the morale of the Berliners and the problem of that city's long‐run econom­ic and psychological health and vigor in the face of the

IF one looks back at this history of the cold war since 1945, there is nothing very new about the exercises I have just cited. We have been liv­ing for the past 18 years in a world of limited clashes of force — limited in immediate objectives, in terrain and in weapons—each intimately in­terwoven with diplomacy and politics. In the period 1945­61 we responded to limited Communist probes with limit­ed means in Greece, the Berlin blockade of 1948‐49, Korea, Quemoy‐Matsu and other points of confrontation.

But there have been two significant developments. First, our basic national security policy now accepts the cen­tral reality of this type of controlled, limited, politico­military confrontation. These episodes are not regarded as exceptions to the rule, to be dealt with ad hoc, but as the form the struggle is most likely to assume. Moreover, it is judged that we have a bet­ter chance to deter such Com­munist probes if we develop before the event a full spec­trum of capabilities—nuclear, conventional and counterin­surgent. With respect to prob­lems of counterinsurgency, our objective is to defeat the Com­munists in the initial stage of their efforts to gain power—when they are building the po­litical foundations for insur­rection and before full‐fledged guerrilla war (of the Vietnam type) can be mounted.

The second difference lies in the expanding Soviet nuclear delivery capabilities. Here there has been a fundamental question that the United States in particular, and the West, in general, had to answer if there was to be any hope of a stable military environment.

IT has been basic to Khru­shchev's stance on the world scene—at least since his evo­cation of nuclear blackmail in April, 1956 — that the West might accept limited setbacks rather than risk a direct con­frontation and nuclear war, once Moscow acquired fusion weapons and rockets. It is evi­dent that his policies with respect to Berlin and, later, with respect to the installa­tion of offensive weapons in Cuba, were strongly colored by this hope: Would the United States be willing, in the new nuclear environment, to act in defense of vital Western inter­ests with the strength and will that it had exhibited in earlier times when the Soviet nuclear threat was less substantial. This was a question being asked not merely in Moscow but in every other capital.

I remember well a conver­sation in July, 1961, with a Soviet diplomat. He stated his belief that, under the strain of a Berlin crisis, none of our European allies would continue to support the position in West Berlin. I then pointed out to him that Hitler had made a similar misjudgment about the British in the nineteen‐thirties at a time when, superficially, they did not appear united, strong and determined. He im­mediately replied: “That was before nuclear weapons exist­ed.” I suggested that if you back men against the wall with nuclear weapons, al­though it might not make sense statistically or historic­ally, they were likely to be­have on the principle: “I can only die once.”

IN a sense, the men in Mos­cow have had to establish whether the nerve and will of the West matched their own. This is the essence of the prob­lem of credibility. The whole Communist movement has been, since its origins, rooted in the conviction that the dis­ciplined conspiratorial minor­ity who form the core of Com­munist organization can over­whelm the greater potential power of non‐Communists by their greater purposefulness and toughness of fiber. Behind all the elaborate mechanisms of diplomacy, behind the in­credible complexity and sophis­tication of the world of nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles, the cold war comes down to this test of whether we and the democratic world are fun­damentally tougher and more purposeful in the defense of our vital interests than they are in the pursuit of their glo­bal ambitions.

One would hope that it is now understood, after the crises of the past several years, that the American people, as well as their Government, ac­cept the fact that the heart of a credible deterrent in a nu­clear age lies in being prepared to face the consequences, should deterrence fail.

Current national security policy, then, is not basically new. It builds on how all postwar United States Admin­istrations have faced their re­sponsibilities in protecting the frontiers of freedom. But it also aims to make less attrac­tive to Moscow and Peking the kind of Communist enter­prises which, for example, be­tween 1958 and 1961 placed Southeast Asia, Central Africa, and the Caribbean—as well as West Berlin—in mortal danger.

FOR its execution, such a pol­icy requires that the military and civil arms of government work together in the greatest intimacy and mutual respect. The progress made in this di­rection over recent years has been substantial, as a new gen­eration of military men and civilians has emerged whose mature experience has been dominated by the curious struggle of politics, force and creative enterprise which is the cold war.